Hi Zora,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 1: I’m equally interested in pretty much everything but not especially committed to any one interest .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were self-direction, hedonism, and benevolence.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was conscientiousness.
You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you were not sure yet about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get internship .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Sleep 8 hrs every day .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Better mental health .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said School work .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When it is midnight, then I will stop doing all work .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in violin .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Embarrassed when receiving critical feedback, and Embarrassed when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling nearly an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel Emotional .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness — but happiness is in the pursuit |
| Talents are what come easily to you |
| Will smith said harmony is aerodynamic |
| Consulting takes the ill structured problem of life and turns it into a well structured problem |
| True flow state is a state of concentration |
| Try again quote by sam beckett |
| Willpower is a muscle —not |
| Need mental representation in order to achieve |
| Hillel quote: if not me for myself then who |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Jake Peralta |
| Zora always brought a funny and easygoing demeanor to our group conversations. In class, she was always the one to crack a joke or mess around to cheer up people around her. She seems to be the type of person to say what she thinks and just be really down to earth and chill at all times. She never took anything too seriously but always tried to get to know the people around her. She took a genuine interest in asking me about my language and background, and I really appreciated that about her. I know she is a very genuine and friendly person and that will carry her through whatever she ends up doing in the future.
I appreciated her creative side a lot in her discovery project. Though I don't know a lot about crocheting, she always seemed to show a lot of excitement for it when we would talk in group discussions. It's clear that she really loved the activity. She put in the effort to become practice and improve her consistency, so much so that I could visibly see the improvement in the scarf she made by the end of the semester. |
| Rachel Lee |
| Zora is an amazing peer grit classmate and she is always a wonderful friend to talk to! Though she joined our team later in the semester, with her emotional intelligence and abilities to connect with others, she integrated well into our team with ease. She even took the initiative to first create our team group chat.I really appreciate that she is always open to sharing her candid personal experiences and that I was able to get to know her better this semester. She always contributes positive vibes during our team discussions as well as breaks, and I enjoyed everything from sharing our music interests to challenging her on GamePidgeon games. She is empathetic and adds a lot of value to our team discussions by being a great listener as well. I am confident that she will be able to concentrate on her pursuit of her passions and values with steadfast concentration!
I loved Zora’s presentation on her journey to learning how to crochet and getting in touch with more of her creative side. She was able to have strong presentation skills and her presentation was especially unique because she was able to bring her finished crochet scarf! I thought it was incredibly smart and fun to share the end product with the audience for them to be engaged. I am so proud that she was able to use the course concepts to develop a new hobby and get to meet others who share the same interests as her through her curiosity conversation and other activities! Zora showed a lot of tenacity and resilience by overcoming the initial setback of her product not looking like she wanted, and I liked how she still strived to perform better by learning from others and practicing even more. I also liked her “Future Steps” slide because how it tied everything together very nicely, and I think that I learned a lot from her presentation about elements that I want to incorporate into my next presentation!
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.